The present disclosure relates to the field of communications, and more particularly to utilization of communication bandwidth available to an information handling system.
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to acquire, process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system (‘IHS’) generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, IHSs may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in IHSs allow for IHSs to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, entertainment, and/or global communications. In addition, IHSs may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Many IHSs include one or more network interface adapters (NIA) (may also be referred to as network interface cards, network interface controllers (NIC) or local area network on a motherboard (LOM)) to communicate via a network. The NIA includes at least one port for forming a communications path with the network. Some NIAs may include multiple ports. Alternative network interfaces may include modems, wireless local area network (LAN) adapters, and optical interfaces. A network team may be formed by aggregating at least two ports emanating from one computer or server included in an IHS.
Presently, network communications load balancing may be typically achieved by either selecting a dedicated port to carry the full communications load or by evenly distributing the communications load across each one of the ports included in a network team. Thus, network team configurations having dissimilar port characteristics may be underutilized or in some cases may not be utilized.
Therefore, a need exists to better utilize available bandwidth of the ports included in the network team. Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide for communications throughput of a port included in an IHS through improved load balancing, absent disadvantages, some of which have been discussed above.